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U.S. indie director Todd Haynes is just getting busy again with work on an upcoming new feature, nearly seven years after his last, the multiple-Dylan biopic I’m Not There, and two years after his HBO mini-series remake of Mildred Pierce.
But despite his steadily more hectic schedule Haynes didn’t want to miss a trip up from his Portland home to this weekend’s retrospective of his work at Vancouver’s Cinematheque.
“I’ve been asked in the past to take part in the Cinematheque and haven’t had the time, so I said OK pick a day,” Haynes said this week over the phone.
After making that promise, an upcoming film project “fell in my lap,” he said, adding the Vancouver trip “is coming at a crazy time because we really are in pre-production.”
Unlike many directors, Haynes said he enjoys getting out to audiences personally with his films.
“I learn a lot about how the film is received,” he said. “It’s meaningful to touch back with the world in that way and not be too caught up in a little island of film production constantly.”
The Vancouver retrospective kicks off with I’m Not There, in which Haynes cast a group of actors — Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett among them — as versions of singer Bob Dylan in a freewheeling reinterpretation of Dylan’s life. Blanchett was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of the mid-1960s electric Dylan.
Haynes had come up with the notion of having a woman play Dylan, androgyny being a recurring theme in his work.
“My concept preceded my landing on Cate as the absolute and totally perfect actor to bring that crazy idea to reality,” Haynes said. “I just felt there was this crazy androgyny to his persona that needed to be restated.”
The shaggy-haired, mumbling Blanchett bore an eerie resemblance to early Bob.
“It’s not until you’re lucky enough to hook up with an actor like Cate that those ideas become manifest. It still blows my mind what she did with that idea, certainly not a simple one. She saw what I saw, she understood it.”
Haynes started his filmmaking career with the controversial 1987 short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which told the anorexic singer’s life and death using a cast of Barbie dolls. That movie has only rarely been screened owing to lingering copyright issues.
He said he’s never had an easy time making his films — among them the 1950s-set Far From Heaven and the glam-rock music story Velvet Goldmine — because he doesn’t tend to repeat himself.
“Each time it feels like you’re starting from scratch,” he said. “Many of the films I’ve done haven’t necessarily followed the template of the last film and what people have come to expect.”
He credits support from critics and actors for keeping him working.
“Actors know my films, even when they’re not big blockbusters and haven’t made a ton of money. That gives me an advantage in getting the next thing made.”
Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid joined him for 2002’s Far From Heaven, while Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale and Toni Collette signed up for 1998’s Velvet Goldmine. His TV Mildred Pierce — the five episodes get a marathon screening Saturday — starred Kate Winslet.
Haynes does return to certain themes — two of those being the musical creative process, and women in domestic situations.
“What’s funny is how my early little short Superstar is still in some ways my most infamous film,” he said. “It encompasses a lot of themes that my later features would play out in different ways. It’s not only a domestic drama about a woman struggling with her body and her demons. It’s also a film about a musician and an artist and her struggle with that aspect of life.”
Haynes brightens when talking about the making of that film.
“It was all done in miniature, literally we were snapping together the heads and bodies of our extras and dressing them. Little miniature sets, setting up little tracking shots on an animation board with a little crank attached to it,” he said. “You realized you could do it all with your own hands.”
His next project is another period piece, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Carol, about a May-September romance between two women in early 1950s New York. He reteams with Blanchett as the older woman, joined by Rooney Mara.
The movie, to film next spring in Cincinnati, came to him with uncharacteristic ease, he said.
“I’d heard about this project because a lot of friends were attached to it, starting with Cate. There was a script out there and suddenly they needed a director,” he said.
“It’s such an interesting time historically, the very cusp of the 1950s, a kind of freezing over of possibilities, a fatigue with the Korean war, rising McCarthyism, a very difficult time for this kind of relationship to form. The novel ended with a ray of hope which made it radical for its time.”
Haynes said he’s gathering his creative partners as design work ramps up for the new shoot, but Vancouver will be a welcome and familiar break.
“During the whole Bush years me and my boyfriend would want to leave the states on the fourth of July and drive into Vancouver and just explore that city, such a distinct city in Canada.”
The Cinematheque retrospective continues until Sunday.
gschaefer@theprovince.com
twitter.com/glenschaefer

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